Shredding the Past, Page By Page

May 2, 2018

As Boris and I settle back into our apartment we’ve continued to purge all sorts of things I hadn’t given much thought to before the disruption. I think everyone has way too much stuff, and we are no different, but nothing was getting done about it until we were forced to.

There are a few thing I REALLY hated having to pack and move, and the one I’m going to write about here is my collection of fourteen years of journals. The bulk of them have been stored under our bed for years, totally ignored and forgotten about. I’ve been keeping a journal since shortly after high school, and it’s something I continue to do to this day. I disposed of some of these the last time I visited Toronto because the first batch was stored and forgotten about at my mom’s place. There was just no way I was going to ship them back to Vancouver and continue to store them here, so I went through an elaborate plan to trash them at the end of our visit five years ago. It’s a funny story, and you should ask me about it sometime.

This time around I am shredding each book one by one using a paper shredder. It is a very satisfying thing to do, and I’m already down to the group pictured above. I’m doing this because I don’t want to keep them, and I don’t ever want anyone else to read them. I’m not interested in reading them myself and don’t even look through them much before I shred them. It’s too much like dwelling on the past, and I don’t want or need to do that.

Maybe the strangest part of all is that I will continue keeping a journal for years to come. I write two pages in a notebook three or four times a week, just as I have for years because it is part of my creative habits. I love writing by hand and it is one of the few opportunities for me to do it.

Do you keep a journal? I’m curious to hear about other people’s long-term plans for their private writings.